Arab critics attacked Said for stereotyping Orientalism and misrepresenting Islam

Evidence

But some of the book’s hardest critics were Arabs. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm’s bafflement regarding Said’s adulation of Massignon, as well as his doubts about the chronology of Orientalism offered by Said, have already been mentioned. More generally, al-‘Azm in his brilliant article ‘Orientalism in Reverse’ agreed with Said on the self-righteousness of Orientalists and their tendency to create ‘an ontological rift’ between East and West, but he attacked Said for stereotyping Orientalism and for grotesquely misrepresenting Islam. Said was wrong to trace Orientalism’s origins back to Homer and Dante, as that disguised the fact that it was essentially a modern phenomenon. Al-‘Azm suggested that for Said representation seemed more real than reality and that his hostility to the schematization and codification of knowledge was irrational. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 539

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the common view that Orientalism’s critics were entirely from the colonized world defending Said.

Related

• Said’s critique of Orientalism also suppressed Arab scholars and drew on Arab precursors (similarity 0.88)
• Prominent critics of Orientalism have praised scholars deeply complicit in its assumptions. (similarity 0.87)
• Said’s Orientalism critique has done more harm than good, delegitimizing the search for knowledge, ignoring Muslim scholars’ positive contributions, and denigrating real threats like Islamist… (similarity 0.86)
• Arab and Islamic studies resisted the 1960s scholarly revolutions that revised other area studies (similarity 0.85)
• Many Orientalists wrote directly for Muslim and Arab audiences (similarity 0.84)
• Said traces imperial conquest back to centuries-old Western habits of representing the Orient (similarity 0.84)
• Said’s Orientalism targets the Middle East, not the Far East. (similarity 0.84)
• Said’s Orientalism denies colonized agency while criticizing the West for silencing it. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism is a differentiated analysis, not a blanket attack on the West (similarity 0.83)
• Said never corrected factual errors in Orientalism and refused to concede points (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism’s intent was critique, not affirmation of antithetical identities (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s Orientalism critique lacks the historical and geographical distinctions to define its target audience (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s liberalism foreclosed any possibility that the Orient could instruct the West (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s own theory of representation contradicts his book’s accumulated negative detail about Orientalist depictions. (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s own work replicated the very Orientalist contempt he critiqued (similarity 0.82)